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Witness the fate of the One Ring and Sauron! The Epic quest line reaches a major milestone, and remains free to all players.

The Black Book of Mordor

We begin a new story in Update 21 that will continue in future updates. Travel beyond the Black Gate, seek treasure and conquest, and discover what happens when the Free People enter a land of evil and corruption.

Explore Gorgoroth, including:

Udûn, the entryway that holds great forges, quarries, and parade grounds of Mordor.

Dor Amarth, the rocky plain holding the broken bones of Barad-dur

Talath Úrui, located south of Mount Doom, home to key fortresses, prisons, and military establishments.

Lhingris, west of the Morgai ridge, home to Cirith Ungol.

Agarnaith, a valley southeast of Barad-dur with a dense, pestilent, and bloody swampland.

Level Cap Increase

The level cap has been raised to 115.

Allegiance System

This new end-game system allows players to pledge their allegiance to one faction at a time. Pledge yourself to the Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, or Men, and unlock rewards through activities in Mordor, including a unique story arc! Players will accrue Allegiance Points which advance your character along a given Allegiance. These points can be earned through acquiring items found in Mordor, completing repeatable quests, and more.

Light of Eärendil/Shadow

Areas of Shadow can be found in varying intensity throughout Mordor. These areas weaken visitors, but the Light of Eärendil can counteract this darkness. Your character will see a Shadow and Light Rating, which will help you understand the threat posed by the Shadow. Items that grant Light of Eärendil can be found in Mordor.

UI

A Frill Density slider has been added to the Advanced Graphics tab under "Scenery". This option adjusts the amount of frills loaded onto a scene as a percentage.

The Advanced Graphics tab now has an added Particle Effects header with three options: Dynamic Particle Rendering, Precipitation Effects, and Static Environmental Objects.

Particle Rendering allows the player to choose which particle effects to render. The options are None, Me, Me + Targets, Targets, and All.

Precipitation Effects will disable weather effects, such as rain and snow.

A second 10 Year VIP Portrait Frame is now available to qualified players.

Settings that are saved in the userpreferences.ini file, such as graphics preferences, are now saved to disk when the character options panel is closed. This aims to reduce occurrences of settings being lost due to client crashes.

Our new Anniversary Scavenger Hunt begins on Thursday! Waldo Rumble requires your assistance at the Party Tree in the Shire. Complete scavenger hunts each week to earn rewards and celebrate ten years of LOTRO!

News and Notes:

Items

The Treasure Hunter's Satchel will now correctly display the applied dye. However, this item's dye color will interfere with Rune-keeper satchel dyes when worn together.

Housing - Silent Hope and Hills of the Shire music boxes now loop all available tracks instead of looping a single track after the first play-through.

Crafting - The Large Bundle of Dagorlad Provisions and Small Bundle of Rangers' Provisions recipes now require a single Rangers' Journal of Dagorlad Cookery each to craft.

Crafting - The tailor "Padded Gondorian Garments" recipe will no longer have the option to craft a Supreme Essence of Masterful Agility.

Emotes - Acquisition of the Stoicpose is no longer incorrectly gated by having /heropose.

Emotes - The Stoicpose emote will no longer show both a bow and an offhand weapon overlapping each other. Hunters will hold their bow while other classes will hold their equipped offhand weapons.

Regions and Quests

Book 8: The Black Gate has been added to the deed for Epic Volume IV: The Strength of Sauron.

The Wastes - Dol Acharn, "Vengeance of the Fallen" and "Memories of the Last Alliance" should no longer slow unreasonably bright when your graphics are set to DX10 or DX11.

The Wastes - Dol Acharn - The unseen presence on the hill that can defeat you no longer has placeholder text in its name.

The Wastes - The correct map now shows when visiting Lang Rhuven. Various missing map notes were also fixed for The Wastes map.

Dead Marshes - Quest: The Dead of Dagorlad - The reeds have been adjusted so you can once again approach all of the apparitions.

Festival - A Festive Flurry/A Bustling Bloom - Quests should no longer become stuck (unable to accept or decline) in the Auto-bestow panel. Quests have been versioned.

These quests now bestow and require your confirmation to accept. In addition, these types of quests will bestow if you enter the Bree Festival Grounds (Spring Festival), Frostbluff (Yule Fetival), or the Party Tree (Anniversary).

Lone-lands - Reflecting Pool - The solo version of the Red-pass instance now specifies that it is a solo instance.

Mirkwood - Quest - A Cornered Foe - Defeating Shatog's guards very quickly will no longer prevent him from attacking you. Timing has also changed slightly on some of the prisoner's lines to speed up the ending sequence.

Osgiliath (After-battle) - Quest - The Fallen King Renewed: Anduin Water can be selected more easily.

Bree-land Homesteads - 2 Long Street - The doormat has been flipped so that when the Unwelcome Mat is placed, it is no longer backwards.

Shire Homesteads - in a Standard house, the small wall hook next to the door is now flush with the wall.

Cape of Belfalas Homesteads now has its own map with street names displayed.

Various missing map notes have been fixed for the Cape of Belfalas Homesteads map, North Ithilien map, and Pelennor (After Battle) map.

Update 20, The Battle of the Black Gate, features more than ninety quests in three new regions: the Noman-lands, Dagorlad, and the Slag-hills. Discover new adventures beginning in the Camp of the Host.

The Black Gate

Epic Volume IV, Book 8 is now available. Experience the Host of the West’s climactic confrontation with Sauron’s forces at the Battle of the Black Gate, as Aragorn seeks to draw Sauron’s Eye away from his true peril…

Resource Dungeons

Two new dungeons are now available! Explore Carchost, the Towers of the Teeth and Skoironk, the Maggot-holes, each with its own landscape, solo resource instance, and group resource instance.

Prepare the Host of the West for Battle!

Players can acquire supplies, provisions, and armour to prepare the Host of the West for the Battle of the Black Gate! Collect enough items to assist each faction of the Host of the West, and receive unique rewards. Supplies, provisions and armour can be earned through solo and group resource dungeons, Roving Threats, Landscape monsters, and Crafting.

UI

Four additional custom Chat Tabs are now available. These tabs can now display across two rows at the top of the Chat Window.

In the Fellowship Mini Panel, fellows buffs and debuffs will no longer disappear after a fellow is defeated.

The accelerator button should no longer appear on the Deed panel for reputation deeds.

Mount skill icons should now all appropriately grey out when the skill cannot be used.

Added a Stable-masters Collection button on the radar.

The Mordor map should now more correctly display fellow member locations.

As some of you may have heard, CloudFlare had a leak yesterday. We just want to reassure everyone that we are aware of the fact and that while we do use them, we do not appear to have been impacted in any way. This is what they sent to us:

Quote:

Originally Posted by cloudflare

Dear MMOUI,

Thursday afternoon, we published a blog post describing a memory leak caused by a serious bug that impacted Cloudflare's systems. If you haven't yet, I encourage you to read that post on the bug:

While we resolved the bug within hours of it being reported to us, there was an ongoing risk that some of our customers' sensitive information would still be available through third party caches, such as the Google search cache.

Over the last week, we've worked with these caches to discover what customers may have had sensitive information exposed and ensure that the caches are purged. We waited to disclose the bug publicly until after these caches could be cleared in order to mitigate the ability of malicious individuals to exploit any exposed data.

In our review of these third party caches, we discovered exposed data on approximately 150 of Cloudflare's customers across our Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. We have reached out to these customers directly to provide them with a copy of the data that was exposed, help them understand its impact, and help them mitigate that impact.

Your domain is not one of the domains where we have discovered exposed data in any third party caches. The bug has been patched so it is no longer leaking data. However, we continue to work with these caches to review their records and help them purge any exposed data we find. If we discover any data leaked about your domains during this search, we will reach out to you directly and provide you full details of what we have found.

To date, we have yet to find any instance of the bug being exploited, but we recommend if you are concerned that you invalidate and reissue any persistent secrets, such as long lived session identifiers, tokens or keys. Due to the nature of the bug, customer SSL keys were not exposed and do not need to be rotated.

Again, if we discover new information that impacts you, we will reach out to you directly. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Player Housing - Players can now adjust the location of their interior housing decorations! See the notes below for more information.

News and Notes:

Chat Channels

Four additional user defined chat channels have been added, for a total 8 user defined chat channels per player.

There are now 3 global channels: /world, /trade, and /lff. Trade and Looking-for-Fellowship are now global channels accessible via /trade and /lff. Please restrict trading/selling to the /trade channel and grouping requests to the /lff channel.

The advice regional chat channel has been removed.

The eight user chat channels have been added to the Output Channels context menu of the bubble icon on the chat input field.

Corrected an issue with /say. In addition, the range of /say has been increased from 15 meters to 25. Use /shout to double that range.

The global Looking For Fellowship chat channel now shows as LFF instead of LFG in chat.

Fixed a problem with chat was that causing server issues on Bullroarer.

Combat

When your avatar is hit when holding a shield, your weapon should now remain in your hand.

Guardian bleeds for higher tiers can crit.

Guardian's Heavy Strike bleed stacks will no longer fall off enemies when the applied bleed is resisted, and will instead simply not increase. The stack will instead fall off on timeout or removal.

The boxes of Worn Armor available for Throne of the Dread Terror lesser armour token trade-in no longer require completion of the Tier 2 raid. Tarnished jewellery continues to require deed completion.

The Steed of the White City and the Battle-worn Steed of the White City should now appear in the exclusive section of the mounts panel.

Player Housing

Players can now adjust the precise location of interior housing decorations once they are placed in a hook. The decoration hook UI includes 4 scroll bars that allow decorations to be rotated as before, but also to be moved east/west, north/south, and up/down. Exterior housing decorations continue to only allow rotation.

Interior housing decorations can be moved +/- 10 meters along the x, y, or z axis once they are placed.

Clicking the decoration icon to the left of each rotation and translation scrollbar will rotate or move the decoration back to the default position in that axis.

Large Wall housing decorations can now be rotated around their vertical axis.

In decoration mode, hook outlines are now color coded by type.

Premium houses can be purchased using Premium Housing Writs. These writs are given when a player gives up their premium house, or when a character with a premium house transfers to another server. You can also purchase these housing writs on the LOTRO store.

Kin leaders who "sell" their premium house will now properly receive premium housing writs.

Some Belfalas premium housing has been polished, including column gaps and door frames.

Questing and Adventure Areas

The exterior of the Lecture Hall has been removed in Bree.

Guards in Tumladen now walk normally.

Haul should no longer get stuck in a tree in the instance Missing Persons.

North Ithilien - Fixed some flowers that were in unreachable locations.

North Ithilien - Quest: Worts, Weeds, and Wastes - The quest guide now points to the correct location.